Should you trust hotel reviews online?

When choosing a hotel, most of us first check hotel reviews online, and only then book a room. But should you trust reviews on specialized websites or forums?

Trust, but verify!

Most reviews are written by real tourists, but remember, as many people, so many opinions! Each person sees the world in their own way, so any opinion or review will be subjective—this is the main thing you should know when reading other people’s hotel reviews. Before choosing a hotel, decide what you expect from it: low price, helpful staff, huge room, central location, etc. Remember that it’s impossible to combine all qualities at once. There are many ads online offering paid posting on forums and review sites. As a rule, paid reviews stand out sharply from the main mass. After reading 20–30 reviews from real tourists, you will easily learn to identify them.

Where to look for hotel reviews?

There are several types of websites where you can find reviews:

• Hotel booking sites. A large number of reviews can be found on Booking.com.

What to pay attention to when reading a hotel review?

It’s easy to get confused by a large number of both negative and positive reviews. You should trust a review if it is repeated multiple times, especially if tourists from different countries complain about the same thing (here online translation tools will come to your aid). The more specific the review, the more trust it deserves. An emotional description with vague reasons for dissatisfaction often indicates that it is a commissioned review from competitors. Especially if, in addition to the hotel name, the review mentions a travel agency or the website through which it was booked.

Before reading reviews, carefully study the hotel’s description, its location, and the services it provides.

It’s not uncommon to find complaints in reviews related to the absence of Wi-Fi, a safe, a pool, an elevator, etc., even though their presence was not stated in the hotel description. If these services are important to you, choose a hotel where they are available. Always look at the price! Don’t expect a hotel priced at 20–40 dollars per room per night to have daily towel changes, a spacious room, an elevator, a pool, or a magnificent view from the window. Tourists often complain about neighbors, such as noisy Germans, Chinese, etc. Unfortunately, you can’t choose your neighbors, and the hotel is not to blame here, so you can ignore such complaints. You can be unlucky with neighbors in a hotel for 20 dollars a night as well as for 200. Another common reason for complaints is street noise. Here you need to refer back to the hotel description, or more precisely, its location, and clarify where it is situated. If you were looking for a hotel near entertainment venues, bars, clubs, and restaurants, then noise is an unavoidable cost. Reviews about distances deserve a separate discussion: to the sea, to the restaurant, to the beach, to… Before booking a hotel, always look at the map. Most modern hotel booking services show the hotel’s location with an accuracy of a few meters. However, if the map shows that the sea is only 100 m away, but reviews say you need to walk 10 minutes or take a bus, we advise you to carefully study the description of the area where it is located. Perhaps the hotel is 100 m from a cliff and you cannot descend to the sea there. When reading other people’s reviews, pay attention to what exactly people are complaining about. Tourists often give a hotel a bad rating, not because the hotel itself is bad, but because the vacation as a whole failed for some reason. The tour operator let them down, they didn’t like the excursion, they were rude at a restaurant near the hotel, etc.